Episode #18: Skills for Creating Anything you Want (Creator)
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD A PDF VERSION OF THIS TRANSCRIPTCANEEL: Well, hey, there. Welcome back to another episode of the Online Marketing Made Easy podcast. I’m your host, Amy Porterfield, and today I am shaking things up for the podcast. I’m going to do another “week in the life,” where I’m going to take you on a journey with me throughout my entire next week. I’m going to share with you what I’m working on, what I’m focused on right now, and a lot of behind the scenes, action items, and thoughts, and anything that happens, basically, I’m going to share with you.
And so the reason I’m doing this is sometimes it’s fun to see another entrepreneur navigate through their week. And I don’t know about you, but I’m always curious as to how people set up their day and what they’re working on and how they choose what they’re going to actually work on that week. And so sometimes on Instagram, I‘ll see some of my friends post, “Okay, here’s what I’m working on today,” and I’m always intrigued. And so I thought you might be curious to know how I set up my day and what I focus on and how I navigate through many, many, many action items.
But also, I’m going to share with you some thoughts and feelings along the way that come up throughout the week. And the reason I’m going to do that is I don’t typically get to share some of the personal stuff with you on an episode where I’m talking about list building or course creation or launching. And so this year I’ve really promised myself to let you in more. And it sounds so cliché to say, “I promise to be more vulnerable,” but really, I just want to promise to be more honest and say, “This is what it looks like. This is where I’m struggling, and this is what I’m going to do about it.”
And so that’s what I’m doing this week. I’m just going to share how the week goes. I’m not really sure how it’s going to go. I have a good sense of the different projects I’m working on, but we’ll see. So, there you have it.
SUNDAY
I’m going to start out with this snippet here, this audio snippet, with—it’s Sunday, and I’m going to do a Sunday night weekly preview. Okay, so, to kick off the “week in the life of…” it is Sunday evening, and every Sunday evening I work inside of my Full Focus Planner—that’s Michael Hyatt’s planner—I work inside the planner and do something called a weekly preview.
Now, just to let you know, and I’m sure I’ll mention this a few times throughout the episode because it comes up so easily because I work inside this planner every day, but we are doing a ninety-day challenge on my team. We’re right in the middle of it right now, where everybody on my team is using a Full Focus Planner, meaning a physical planner that they are writing in. Now—you might hear me go through the pages right now—just to let you know, we also use Asana, which is our digital project-plan software. So every action item that we’re working on inside the business, it is in Asana. However, the reason I wanted to do a ninety-day experiment with the Full Focus Planner is I wanted my team to be really intentional about how they were spending their days, each individual team member. I wanted each team member to think ahead as to what the day’s going to look like and what they’re committed to getting done.
Sometimes when you’re in Asana, it’s just a bunch of tasks. You might have a project plan for, let’s say, we currently have a project plan for Digital Course Academy launch, but that project plan is full of action items assigned to different people with different deadlines. But when you are one person working virtually, I think it’s important to sit down and say, “Okay, how am I going to structure my day? How am I going to get my stuff done, and how can I be incredibly intentional about it so that I can have some morning rituals for myself, and I could shut work down and be with my family in the evenings?” I really want that type of culture. And so to do that, I said, “You guys, let’s just experiment and see what it would look like as a team to use the Full Focus Planner and share our planners every single day.”
So every day, inside of Slack, each team member takes a quick snapshot of their filled-out planner for the day, and they post it either the night before or the morning of the day that they have planned out. So, essentially, you’re posting Monday through Friday. And you post in the morning to say, “This is what my day looks like in my planner.” And then you post in the evening, and you cross things out, and there’s different symbols you use in Full Focus Planner to say if you got it done, if you delegated it, if you deleted it, or whatever. So we actually mock up our day just to kind of show how the day went.
Now, no one’s really monitoring these pages. It’s more of a personal accountability to make sure we get in the habit of actually doing it. So everybody in my team’s amazing at this. Everybody does it every single day. So you do a morning check-in and end-of-the-day wrap-up, and then we all do a weekly preview, and that’s what I’m doing tonight.
So the weekly preview is basically what my week is going to look like, but also, it looks back at the week I just had, and I document what worked and what didn’t work. And I always commit to three big things for the week, and I document if I got those done or not, or how far I got into them. And so it’s really great to keep yourself accountable, and I needed more accountability in my own day, and I know my team really felt that they wanted to be held accountable as well. And we’re coming into a launch, so this was a really good time to get really structured, and so that’s what we’re doing.
And after the ninety days, we’ll see if the team wants to continue this. I 100 percent will continue with my Full Focus Planner, but we’ll see what they want to do and kind of adjust from there.
So in my Full Focus Planner, I’m just going to put down exactly my weekly big three, so the three things I’m committed to doing, and then at the end of the week, I’ll let you know how they go. Yikes, that feels so much pressure. Okay, so let’s see here. Complete the prelaunch runway, which is a PDF I have in DCA, and I’m updating it. So for all my Digital Course Academy alumni, you will get an update of the prelaunch runway, how to build your email list so you can create a course and launch it to people that will actually buy. I’m updating that entire PDF for our new launch of DCA, so my alumni are going to get that as well. So I want to get that done this week. I want to finish batch eighteen, which is the podcast batch we’re in right now, which is part of this episode here. And I want to review the Digital Course Academy quiz content so that we can lock it in and get it live. So those are the three big things that I’m committed to, but, of course, there’s a lot more going on this week, and you will hear all of it as I go through it day by day.
So, basically, those are my three big things in my weekly preview, and I won’t get into the stuff, like, what happened last week, and all of that, but I just wanted to let you know I do use the Full Focus Planner, I do work on it inside of it every single day, and I highly recommend it. I’ll link to it in the show notes for this episode. And this episode is 283, so amyporterfield.com/283. I’ll give you my link to the Full Focus Planner if you want to check one out yourself.
All right, so, that’s it for my quick little check-in for Sunday night, and I will see you for Monday morning and the rest of the week.
MONDAY
Happy Monday. This is my “week in the life” morning check-in, and I’m embarrassed to say, today is bananas. And the reason I say I’m embarrassed to say that is I want to be a great example for all of my students. I don’t want to work my life away, and the sun comes up and I’m at it, and the sun goes down and I’m still at it, and I’m burned out by the end of the day. I do not want that for me, I don’t want that for anybody on my team, and I sure as heck don’t want that for my students who I’m teaching how to build online businesses. However, sometimes you get in really busy seasons, as I mentioned when I set up this whole “week in the life” episode, and so today is really, really busy, and I’m just going to own it.
Now, I woke up with the mindset of, “I’m going to crush the day.” I knew in advance that today would be crazy because on Sunday nights, as you heard, I plan for the week. So I knew what to expect this morning, and I hit the ground running.
So at this point, it’s 8 a.m., and I have already walked Scout, so we did our morning walk. I listened to Audible this morning, and I listened to this book Where the Crawdads Sing. Oh my gosh, it is so good. When I have a really busy day, I’m not going to start my morning on my walk listening to a business podcast. It’s just too much. So, I needed a little calm before the storm, and listening to an audio book is my favorite—as you all know; I talk about it all the time—and so I listened to that book for about thirty minutes while I walked Scout, and it was great.
In addition to that, I’ve already prepared for my prelaunch Facebook Live number four, which is happening tomorrow. So we are in the prelaunch phase of Digital Course Academy right now, and I’m doing weekly Facebook Lives related to course creation. So I prepared this morning for my session tomorrow, and it took me about twenty minutes. It was nothing too extensive.
And I also got on the phone with one of my team members, who lives on the East Coast, that was just having a hard morning. She was stressed out—lots to do right now—and she needed someone just to listen to her and kind of recalibrate what she’s working on so we could talk about, can we take anything off your plate? Can we rework anything? And I feel, as the leader of this team, even though I only manage one person—I only manage Chloe, my integrator. Chloe then manages all of my directors, and then the directors manage their own managers and coordinators. And so I only technically manage Chloe, which is super easy because she manages herself, but with that, I do check in with my team members, and I definitely want to know what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, and sometimes it gets really tough for them because we are an intense business and we move fast. So checking in when they need a little extra TLC or need somebody just to vent to for a moment, I am that girl when I need to be. And other people on my team will step in that way because we all need it.
I’m glad I didn’t do this episode last week. I think I needed a little extra TLC last week. Things just felt tough. And so I called team members and said, “Look, I just got to talk to you about this for a moment.” Talk it out. Once I do so, I feel better. So I rely on my team just as much as they rely on me, and so that’s just what you do when you’re a small team and you want to keep a pulse on everybody.
So, I had a really great check-in call with one of my team members, I worked on my Facebook Live, I walked Scout, and I recorded some Libsyn ads. So Libsyn is the software we use for our podcast. And I recorded some ads that we’re going to put through Libsyn that will run on the podcast, one for my live event, Entrepreneur Experience, and another one for my free list-building masterclass. So we’ll run those ads continuously on specific podcast episodes. And so I recorded those ads just to make sure we got them locked and loaded very soon.
So it’s already been a full morning, and you might think, “What the heck?” But remember, I am a morning person. So by three o’clock today, I’m not going to be doing my best work, so that’s why I leave some of my review time until later, where I don’t have to create from scratch. But this morning, I had to create some stuff from scratch, so I always do it bright and early.
Now, at 8:30 this morning, Hobie will be home, and it’s really important to Hobie that I take some time to have our morning coffee. And I’ve talked about this on the show before; Hobie’s love language is quality time. Mine is not. Mine is acts of service. Take out the trash, and I think you’re the sexiest husband in the world. But Hobie wants time, which is actually really sweet. I’m a lucky girl that my husband wants to spend a lot of time with me. And so in my calendar—and I’ll walk through my calendar really quickly—I have put time for Hobie, from eight thirty to nine for coffee.
Now, he doesn’t technically need to know that he is scheduled into my calendar. I don’t know if that is his most favorite thing, to be one of the line items. However, I’m just fully present when he gets home from the fire station. So he’s driving home right now. I know he gets home around 8:30. I’m fully present, I’m downstairs, I’m making my coffee—Bulletproof, of course—and we’re going to spend a little time together because he, as a firefighter, works for twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off, and I haven’t seen him for twenty-four hours. So, it’s always fun to check in.
So here’s my day. I already told you this morning’s tasks and what I did. Those are literally in my Full Focus Planner. But from there, after coffee, I’m going to work on a quiz that we are putting the final touches on for my Digital Course Academy launch. The quiz is how to know what type of course is best for your business, so I’m going to be reviewing some of the work we’ve done on that.
And then we have a team kickoff call. This is fun, and this is new. We’ve never done it quite like this. Chloe was at my house yesterday for a quick minute, just to show me the keynote that she put together for the team kickoff call for Digital Course Academy. So if you’re going to be doing a launch, this is something you might find really valuable.
We’re going to do a one-hour call today at 10 a.m. with the entire team, and we’re going to walk through what it looks like to launch Digital Course Academy. We’ve already launched it once. We know the mistakes we made. We know the big wins. If you bought Digital Course Academy in January, you got the launch debrief, so we’re going to pull some things out of that launch debrief about what we did well, what didn’t work.
So we have a newish team. We’ve been building our team over this year. Many of them have never launched with us before. They don’t really get what a big deal it is. So we’re going to be talking about the dates of launching and the most important, most busiest times during the launch, which is when the webinars are going on. We’re going to be talking about who’s doing what; if you get stuck, what resources to turn to. Each person in each department is going to be talking about a little piece of the launch. We want this to be a full-team effort, and we also don’t want Chloe to be the only point person, the all-knowing.
And that’s one mistake we’ve gotten into in the past is my integrator on my team, Chloe, everyone would go to her with every single question because she was the keeper of all the details of the launch. And so she said, “Amy, as we build this team, I can’t be the only person, because I’m trying to run a launch and answer a million questions.” And I said, “I totally get it.” So we have different people on the team being point people this time, which is really exciting.
Also, I told Chloe that one theme throughout this team kickoff call for Digital Course Academy today is that we want everybody to know that we are master troubleshooters. During a launch, links will not work. There’s literally no planning you can do to make every single link during a launch work perfectly. There’s going to be pages that will go down. There’s going to be typos that people will find, and a hundred people will write us to let us know we have a typo in an opt-in page. There’s going to be people that are frustrated or confused. Things will happen that will not be according to plan, no matter how much we plan, because over here at Team Porterfield, we are master planners, but we’re going to have things that will break during the launch. So I want my team to know that is just par for the course, and what we do is we get to troubleshooting. We’re resourceful. We figure it out. And everybody has to figure it out.
So, we’re setting the theme. We’re setting the tone of this launch, how we want it to look and feel internally with this team kickoff call. And so I’m really excited about it. We’ve never done anything like it before, and we’re just getting everybody on the same page so nobody can say, “But I didn’t know x, y, z.” Now you know. And if you don’t know, here’s how to figure it out. So, that’s what we’re doing at ten o’clock today.
After that, I have a little mini break, and then, I’m going to go into another meeting where we are going to talk about my live event, Entrepreneur Experience. This is the first year that we hired an event team to help us out, and so the event team has weekly meetings with us to talk about different things such as the content we’re doing onstage, what the speaker content’s going to look like, what the panels are going to look like. Am I going to make an offer on stage? If so, what will that look like? We’re going to talk about who’s in the room and how to make sure they have the best experience possible. We’re going to talk about how we want people to feel when they walk in, how we want people to feel throughout the event, what we want them to feel when they leave. So all of these things are discussed on a weekly basis in our event call.
And then, I’m going to take a lunch—I always put lunch into my calendar—and then I have a leadership level-ten meeting. A level-ten meeting is something we learned through EOS. So entrepreneur operating system is what EOS stands for. And basically, we follow the EOS system inside of our business. You can learn more about EOS in the book Rocket Fuel and Traction, two books I’ve talked about on this podcast.
So these level-ten meetings are meetings that are done in a very specific way, and the one I have today is every Monday with my leadership team. So my leadership team is my marketing director, who happens to be Chloe. So Chloe has a dual function on the team. She is an integrator as well as the marketing director. So we have a marketing director. Then we have a content director. Her name is Jen, and I worked with her in my Tony Robbins days, so it’s really exciting to have somebody on the team that I’ve worked with in the past. And then we have a community director. Her name is Sylvia. And then we have an operations director, which is Jess, who’s been on my team for about a year now. But Jen and Sylvia are pretty new at the time of this recording. So I have four directors on the team, and then me, and we do a weekly level-ten meeting. And then, the directors all have their own level-ten meetings with their small teams. Remember, I’m still a small business. I only have, at the time of this recording, ten full-time employees.
Now, I know I just said, “I only have ten full-time employees.” If you said that to me a year ago, I’d say, “Holy cow. You have a huge business.” So I know it’s all perspective. I’ve never wanted a really big team. However, as I’ve started to dream bigger and play a bigger game, I’ve realized I can’t do that with three full-time employees.
But listen to me. You’ve got to grow your team slow. Do not compare your team with my team, having ten full-time employees. I’ve been in business ten years. So if you’re just getting started in your first few years of business, it might still be you, or you and a V.A., or you and a project manager. That’s what it’s supposed to look like. You want to grow slow.
So, anyway, if you come to my event, Entrepreneur Experience, you will get to meet my team and hear how I’ve grown my team over the years, so just stay tuned. And if you join my membership experience, Momentum, then you’re definitely going to get a behind-the–scenes view of how to grow your team and how to manage your team, because we’re going to talk a lot about that in my membership experience.
Okay, so, here’s the deal. We have this level-ten meeting, and then the directors have their own level-ten meetings in their own departments. So we do definitely do weekly meetings. I don’t love meetings. I actually really don’t love meetings, but I see how paramount they are in order to keep everybody on the same page with a bigger team like I have now.
Okay, and then from there, the rest of my day, I’m going to just review certain documents that my team needs me to take a final look at. So we have had a lawyer do a full audit of all of our legal documents. So I just got to review her notes. Super sexy, right? I am dreading it, but it just has to happen. I do some things I don’t love. But here’s the great thing. I didn’t start the process. I had my operations director start it. She’s done the initial review—bless her heart—and now I’m just going to do a quick review, which is great. So at this point, I tend to do quick reviews or final reviews versus having to be the first person looking at things. So, that’s happened over the years. That’s something to aspire to. It definitely hasn’t always been that way.
And I’m also going to review a studio proposal today, which is a proposal for the live stream that we’re going to do during the Digital Course Academy launch. So I forget when this episode is launching. I’m pretty sure it’s—oh, I’m positive—it’s after the Digital Course Academy launch. So by the time you hear this, you might have seen the live stream that we’re going to do, where we’re going to bring people into a live studio that have been success stories in Digital Course Academy, and I’m going to interview them, and we’re going to air it live. And I’ve never done it, and I’m super nervous because it’s live and because it involves my students and because it involves a studio and all of that stuff. But I’m playing a bigger game this year, and we wanted to add some new elements to our Digital Course Academy launch, and so here we are. So by the time you hear this, I hope you loved it. So I’m going to review our proposal, make sure that it’s within our budget, make sure it includes everything I want to do, and we’re good to go.
And one final review, I’m going to review the June financials. Now, at the time of this recording, we’re in August. I’m a little bit behind. I would have liked to review June financials a few weeks ago. We just got a little behind with everything else going on, and it is what it is, but I like to review the P&Ls from our bookkeeper. And so our bookkeeper sends them to our operations director. She gives them a review, fixes anything that needs to be fixed, and then I do a final review. So I have to review those financials today. Also, I don’t necessarily love it, but we have a pretty good system so it makes it easy, and I’ve got to know my numbers. Every month I’ve got to look at our current numbers to make sure we’re on track, and if not, I’ve got to go into the leadership level-ten meeting and say, “I looked at the financials. We’re off track here. What are we going to do?” I can’t have those conversations if I don’t have the information.
Okay, so, this check-in was way longer than I had planned, but it’s, first of all, it’s Monday. Mondays tend to be busy. Second of all, I got into way more detail than I had planned, but, hopefully, you felt it was valuable, and the check-in tonight, I’ll make sure to make it short and sweet. But that’s what my day looks like today. And you can bet that this “week in the life” audio here was in my planner. So it was planned. So I’m actually—I gave myself thirty minutes, and this is seventeen minutes, so I’m doing good. So I’ve got ten minutes to go and take a little break and then—actually, take a longer break—and have coffee with my sweet husband. So I’m going to go do that now, and I’ll check in by the end of the day and let you know if I hit all my action items. Cross your fingers for me. All right, have a great day, and I’ll talk to you soon.